1909–1911: (Banks and Railroads: The Franco-German Consortium, the National City Bank, and the Battle for Haiti’s Finances): Through commercial and financial…

1909–1911: (Banks and Railroads: The Franco-German Consortium, the National City Bank, and the Battle for Haiti’s Finances): Through commercial and financial interests, Germany and France enjoyed greater influence in Haiti than anywhere else in the Caribbean. French assets were cultural, commercial, and financial — the clergy were French, France bought two-thirds of Haiti’s coffee through the import houses of Le Havre, and every loan from 1825 to 1896 had been French. German commercial involvement was equally powerful: Germans took nearly a third of Haiti’s coffee, ships of the Hamburg-America Line moved two-thirds of Haiti’s trade, and the spearhead of German penetration was the Central Railway of Haiti — a holding company controlling the P.C.S. Railroad, the Port-au-Prince wharf and ice plant, and electric companies, all dominated by Gustav Keitel & Co. and the bankers of Hamburg. German merchants had moreover married into Haitian families, bypassing constitutional prohibitions against foreign land-ownership and assimilating more successfully than any foreign group. Most critically, it was German loans that bankrolled each successive revolution — revolutionary bonds purchased at ten cents on the dollar and redeemed at handsome profit if the revolution succeeded, a system that one American official characterized as participation that could properly be classified only as theft, adding that the wonder was that the Haitians were as good as they were. In mid-1910 a Franco-German consortium proposed a new Banque with a 65 million franc loan secured by bank control of customs, while simultaneously the National City Bank and Speyer & Co. offered a competing $12.5 million loan with either U.S. customs receivership or direct bank control. When Antoine Simon sent the European proposals to the National Assembly on September 5, the State Department reacted violently, cabling Furniss that the arrangement was so detrimental to American interests, so derogatory to the sovereignty of Haiti, and so inequitable to the people of Haiti that Washington would reserve all its rights. The upshot — final defeat of French and German designs and ultimate American financial hegemony in their stead — was an arrangement approved by Secretary Knox on January 11, 1911, in which American interests led by the City Bank took 50 percent control of the new Banque Nationale de la République d’Haïti, which would receive government revenues, service the external debt, and give the government back what little was left — while instead of receiving interest on its deposits, the government was incredibly to pay the Banque a 1 percent commission for holding its money.